Quote:
Originally Posted by ISiddiqui
I'd also argue that if we got true a la carte, we'd been begging for cable TV within a year as prices would likely be far higher than we anticipated they would be. Amazon and iTunes can sell programs the next dat for $2.99 an episode, but that's mostly because the providers get money for being on a cable tier. Unmoor that, and I can see AMC deciding that $5.99 an episode for The Walking Dead would be the price.
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Cable operators have been saying this for quite a long time but the message wasn't precise enough for the general public, imho. Mainly due to not wanting to piss off the programming conglomerates, or be accused of favoritism between programmers.
What I see everybody describing is the issue with disparate service offerings. Cable operators (and other MVPDs such as dish & telco operators) all buy content at wholesale rates, aggregate all of that disparate content, and try to present it through a series of genre-based "portals" (or channels if you will). 1 interface, on 1 device, running 1 common platform to get any & all content from. Some look better & some do certain things better...but they are all an incredible value when compared to what you have access to. But great value is not necessarily "cheap", and this is essentially the problem with disparate offerings.
The other things that people sometimes argue in regards for a-la-carte is they just want to buy ESPN but not ESPN2...or HBO but not HBO Signature & the rest...or Comedy Central but not MTV. These are not static "portals" (or use the term channels if you prefer) of content with a single pipeline of fixed resources & pricing. The a-la-carte proposition is the programmer themselves (Disney, HBO, Viacom) and their cost-structures entail all of those genre-based portals in their "bundle". And for the "luxury" of being able to select any one of these programmers...you (the consumer) get to aggregate & design your own system to receive the ones you actually care about (assuming more than just 1).
I don't mean to sound like a shill, really I don't, but the entire online video subscription model is not engineered for you the consumer. Its built for programmers to diversify their customer base away from a handful of MVPDs so that losing any individual customer (e.g. 1 consumer) is less damaging (among a few other monetization strategies) . There is no value proposition in play here, at least not purposely done.